


In Your Pocket

by glyphsinateacup



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Lesbians in Space, Space Pirates, implied heist shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27444250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glyphsinateacup/pseuds/glyphsinateacup
Summary: To fill the following prompt:"Space Pirate/Space Lawyer- This pairing intrigues me a lot. With the lawyer, I feel like you could go either "innocent who gets caught up in the pirate's shenanigans", or "morally flexible lawyer who's in cahoots with the pirate". Either would be great, or both?! Maybe the lawyer is playing the pirate."I got really caught up in the world-building here, so I'm really hoping that the setting and genre fit the feel you were looking for! Please enjoy Keller and her pirate.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	In Your Pocket

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Requiem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Requiem/gifts).



> To fill the following prompt: **"Space Pirate/Space Lawyer** \- This pairing intrigues me a lot. With the lawyer, I feel like you could go either "innocent who gets caught up in the pirate's shenanigans", or "morally flexible lawyer who's in cahoots with the pirate". Either would be great, or both?! Maybe the lawyer is playing the pirate."
> 
> I got really caught up in the world-building here, so I'm really hoping that the setting and genre fit the feel you were looking for! Please enjoy Keller and her pirate.

Drea Keller isn’t a patient person; anyone can tell you that. Patience isn’t the kind of virtue that gets you appointed to a Counselship at 26, the youngest for anyone on the Anthium Petal since it was launched. She is diligent over her books (some whisper too diligent, some whisper that she is covering up mistakes or malpractice), but in that diligence she does not extend extra leniency to her clerks, who whisper in pride and apprehension to their bunkmates about the strictness of her task-setting.

Keller’s peers have noted her spirit, drive, and lack of patience, and filed those challenges away in their vast scheme of habitually nursed antagonisms. Most are quietly grateful that her ambition extends only to the codes of patents and reproductions, that she has secluded herself as a policymaker and a theorist, and that they will never need to meet her scalpel gaze across a bench as direct opponents in the law. Drea Keller is a force to be reckoned with, and if she chooses to reckon only with dusty manuals and the methods of resource-allocation gone by, then all the better for the rest of the profession.

So, naturally, Keller being who she is, no one is much surprised that she is not attending the Meridian party this evening. She is still shut in her office as the hour grows late, and her colleagues tilt their heads back, adjust their flare-lenses, sip their marked-up drinks, and watch the New Year’s patterns arrange themselves in the undersides of the smaller, poorer, sunward Petals. As the Emperor’s Line has decreed, no drop of sunlight will be wasted, none will cascade past the edge of the Bloom, and at the changing of the year, the display is best appreciated by the loyal servants who serve the organization of the Bloom itself, who may live on the best-appointed Petals and enjoy the filtered bounty of the all-giving sun.

And Drea Keller, most loyal servant, remains in her darkened office, putting the final touches on a petition to go before the court’s next session, free hand tucked into her left trouser pocket, gently brushing the good-luck charm there. She jumps, stifling a squeak, when that long-dormant charm pulses under her fingertips. The pulse is a message that gives her pause; it makes her smile softly and swipe her console into hibernation with a flick of her index finger. She slips her feet back into her high-heeled shoes (long-discarded under the desk), sweeps her hair back out of her face, reaches for her coat. Reports can wait.

Her peers would never believe it, if they knew, but Drea Keller has a date.

She's been given a time, but Keller can choose the place. she heads for the lowest level of the Petal, the garden where the lamps above produce mock twilight around the clock, a faint and meditative imitation of natural light, if you can ignore the girders they're strung from. The floor is carpeted with ferns and mosses, all kinds of ornamental and hardy plant life, and between the beds there are pools cut into the hull of the Petal itself. Peer through them, you can see the faint glimmer of stars, eons falling away below your feet, no barriers of glass or metal to prevent a fall into the ether.

This is illusion, of course. Stepping into the star-pools in this lowest level of the garden is a logistical impossibility; the gravity field has been structured here to prevent inadvertent falls, and you'll be pushed back but the gentle, paternal hand of technology. It is the same gravity field that holds the breathable air in, despite the lack of a solid barrier. But Keller does choose this place, for its beauty, for its illusions, and for other reasons.

She settles down on the edge of one such pool, hanging her feet into the infinite expanse beyond the Bloom, if only barely so. She fishes the good-luck charm from her pocket, but barely has the time to wonder how long it will be, before a gloved hand reaches in from the hull to grip the metal and plastic at the edge of her seat, before someone pulls herself up through the portal into the star garden, grinning and shaking down an environmental hood down about her shoulders.

Keller doesn't recognize the newcomer's face, but she almost never does. It changes each and every time they meet, as much as the names that this person dons and discards with impunity. Keller has a suspicion that when new crew members get picked up, they're sent to purge old records for the links and hints that could get their captain's identity caught in the complex net cast for her, in the Bloom's territory.

The face doesn't matter much to Keller anyway; the rakish angle to the newcomer's shoulders, the way she shimmies herself into the new angle of the gravity; those are the signals that Keller knows her by. The new feathery-short haircut - in pale blue this time - the glimmering chips and hoops in her ears, even the button roundness of the nose - those are all perfectly new, and perfectly right all the same.

"Jinx!" the newcomer sings, with a smile, throwing her arm around Keller's shoulders. "That was _quick_! Don't tell me you were waiting for me to visit you? Or even," she makes a mock gasp, gripping a little tighter, resting her chin on Keller's shoulder, "Did you stop working just for little old me?"

It's never so hard for Keller to keep a straight face than when they meet. "It's a holiday. I'm not meant to be working. Where's your ship?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." The newcomer's familiar voice takes on a teasing turn. "Going to give me a parking ticket with your new powers, Counsel?"

Keller pulls her tight and laughs acknowledgement, finally, snickers working their way out of her long-day tiredness. "That was only once that I wrote you a citation. And it didn't stick, anyway."

"Too true, Jinx. You can't catch me yet."

"What should I call you this time?"

"For now?" The newcomer holds Keller close, comfortable, humming in thought. "Today I'm Circinus."

"Circinus." Keller tests the name, as she does each time, files it away with all the others. "Is that where you've been?"

"Yes, yes; I'll tell you all about my travels, and the treasures we found and won, and the replicant agents we pieced together from long-lost records. If you want to hear." Circinus's voice falls into a sing-song pattern; the promise is familiar. " And if my canny lady can promise we are hidden from the roving eyes of the law."

"Hidden for now, of course. Hidden for as long as we need to be."

"And how much longer is that, Jinx?" The person who Keller knows tonight as Circinus asks an all-to-familiar question.

"Now that I'm Counsel? Four cycles, and three measures after the Meridian." Keller looks back into Circinus' eyes, letting herself smile, confident in her calculation. "Long enough to activate everything I've been building, since the day we met. Long enough to leave my stamp here, take what I need, and we sail away."

"You're sure?"

"We got your ship, didn't we?"

Her kiss is answer enough. Familiar, jubilant, laced with promise, it sends sparks coursing through Keller's whole self, from the heart racing in her chest to her toes, still hanging out over the depths of the starfield.

Drea Keller isn’t a patient person, after all. But Jinx - the Jinx who plans to see the stars up close - is prepared to wait for the right moment, with the right person.


End file.
